While skiing on a northwestern Wisconsin lake, the white bark of these birch or aspen trees along the lakeshore were absolutely striking against the darkness of the deep evergreen woods behind them. Though overcast, the low sun shortly before dusk seemed to make these trees glow against the contrasting shade behind them.

These photographs were made on color film, but they make even more striking images in black and white. There was really very little color in the scene to start with.

They were shot on Portra 160 in my ‘new’ Agfa Optima II S that I picked up for a few bucks at a local thrift store. This is an automatic-exposure rangefinder made in Germany in the early to mid 1960’s. It has a coupled rangefinder with an easy-to-see diamond-shaped overlapping image area in the center of a nice big viewfinder. Very similar in looks to my Retina Automatic III, including the shutter button located on the front of the camera, it is just slightly larger and heavier, and is fully auto-exposure as opposed to the Retina Auto’s shutter-priority auto-exposure. I prefer the Retina Auto, but this is a nice solid camera, with a capable f:2.8 45mm lens (same speed and focal length as the Retina, but it’s hard for me to judge yet if the results are as good as those from the Retina’s Schneider lens). I’ll be using this camera more, and will write more about it and provide more photos of it later.

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